 Okay, we'll ask folks to start finding their seats, please. Okay, I think we're going to get started. Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming back. I know we hit the, you know, sort of post-lunch doldrums. So thank you so much. So I am so fortunate to be sitting between two incredibly talented people that are really at the forefront of innovation for artists with disabilities and artists in general. So this is Esther Grimm, the Executive Director of Three Arts in Chicago. And she'll talk more about Three Arts in a moment. And this is Barak Desole, can I say that correctly? Awesome. Choreographer who some of you may have seen on Thursday night his brilliant performance on Thursday night. Thank you for that. Barak is a choreographer who is based in Chicago whose work explores the intersection of disability and race. Is that good? And he'll talk more about his work in a few minutes. But we're going to, I think our conversation is going to follow a similar model to the Vermont Studio Center because I think that the setup is similar minus the actual physical structure of the studio. So when I was talking to Esther last week about preparing for this interview she said something interesting to me that sparked sort of kind of frames our whole day in my view. She said, art is about change, negotiating, navigating, evolving. And organizations can follow that credo to avoid becoming static. So I think today is about how can we as arts organizations become more innovative, become more exciting, become revolutionary, and present artists on stage and behind the scenes that are making works, the making work that actually speaks to the human experience in a way that we have not traditionally seen and we've been in a more static mode of, a traditional mode of thinking. So I think that's how I'd like to frame this conversation. So I think I want to start with you, Esther, just talking a little bit about the history of three arts and your mission. I'm kind of amazed that I said that quote. Has that ever happened to you? You say something and it sounds really good when out of somebody else's mouth and no idea you said it. I want to take a 10 second tangent before I tell you a little bit about three arts because I'm also on the board of the Alliance of Artists Communities, which has come up a couple of times. And I want to tell you, you have been officially heard and that the Alliance has named a priority of accessibility. The board of directors has named a priority of accessibility and we are beginning a survey of all of our members to ask them to tell us more deeply what they mean when they say that their residency programs are accessible so that we can deliver that information to all of you and to the artists we serve. And if anybody has any other input they'd like to give me on behalf of that organization, please tell me before the day's over. So you are among the rare people who get to hear the back story of three arts. It's a long history. I'm going to really super abbreviate it because I want to make sure we have time for a real dialogue in this room. But three arts, we know it today which is a non-profit grant making and art service organization supporting women artists, artists of color and artists with disabilities in the six county Chicago metropolitan area. So very big mouthful. Actually stems from, we're about nine years old, it comes from a 104 year old organization that was known as the Three Arts Club of Chicago, founded in 1912 by Jane Adams of the Settlement House movement, many of you might know who she was, and about 30 other women civic leaders in the city who wanted, who identified that women were completely unrepresented in the arts and wanted to help them have a chance to go to the big city, learn their craft and become represented on stages and museums and so on. This was at a time before women had the right to vote, so it was critically important. There were at one point, and as far as my research has shown, eight such clubs located around the world. They were London, Paris, New York, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia and weirdly Cincinnati and Cleveland. And so young women could travel from one to the other and stay there indefinitely in subsidized housing under the watchful eye of what my title would have been in those days, the directress. So that's what we were, and as the world evolved a little bit, time went forward, by 1953 all of the other clubs had closed and our organization kept going as a kind of alternative dormitory for women studying the arts in Chicago when all of the other art schools and downtown universities didn't have the state-of-the-art dorms that they have right now. I came on the scene, I can't believe it, 14 years ago and the board at that time hired me and said, you know we need to contemporize the mission, this historic landmark property that was made for our organization needs to go through some change and I'm going to fast forward through all that we looked into doing and get to where we are now, right? And that is, we ended up selling that beautiful historic property because to restore and renovate it was about $30 million. It's a 50,000 square foot property, we didn't have the wherewithal to do that, but we decided instead to carry forward the tenets of our founding mothers, you know, mission, Jane Addams' mission in supporting women in focusing on Chicago and thinking about social justice and equity. And when I went around to talk to organizations around the country and talk to artists and do research on who was receiving, for example, what artists were receiving grants and awards and so on, it became really clear that women were still underrepresented, underserved, especially in cash granting programs, which is what we were going to be. But people of color, even more so, and people with disabilities, even more so. And so we expanded on that founding mission to include these three groups of people. I'm just going to say one more thing, Christine, because I know you want to ask more questions. There's kind of a controversy of our mission, you know, and it was a tough one for us. And I think it shines a light on the imperfection of words in the world. And, you know, we had a choice. We could say three-art supports underrepresented artists and then build into our national jury panels and our nomination systems and all of that a desire to support diversity. But we really labored over this and we decided, you know what, instead we're going to make an overt statement. Again, as uncomfortable as that makes some people in sort of the same vein that affirmative action made and even still makes some people uncomfortable because we feel that's part of our advocacy. So today we give $10,000, $25,000 unrestricted awards to artists each year in the Chicago metro area. Unrestricted, they can do with it whatever they want. Once you're an awardee of ours, you can apply for an international network of residency fellowships. They're all expenses paid with airfare, $2,000 stipends, month-long residencies in places from France to Florida. And we also offer project support for our awardees and for other organizations, artists in Chicago that is a crowdfunding program but three-arts pays for a third of every project. And I'm very pleased to say that we have in that program 3AP, three-arts projects, 100% success rate and 65 projects funded to date. That's it. And can you talk about which disciplines you said? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, just so people are clear. Let's see. And this is, you know, the whole story of three-arts is like starting somewhere and then growing and changing and listening and growing and changing and listening. And part of the growing and changing was that we began with music, theater, and visual arts. We did six awards at $15,000 when we opened our doors in 2008. And then we did a little, we read some studies about dance, especially in Chicago, and recognized that dance is probably the most undernourished in terms of funding form where we live. I don't know if that's true here. Right, and there you are. And so we added dance. And then when the recession hit, instead of, I should say this, when we sold the property, we invested the net proceeds from the sale. You know, it's like mom and dad rubbing the two pennies together and going, come on. And when the recession hit, our portfolios went from about $9.5 million to $5 million. And so that was a cue to us that we had to start really fundraising. But we made a bold decision. We read that great, wherever Beth is, the great NEA study that said that artists were under-employed, unemployed at twice the rate of other professional workers during the recession. And our little board said, you know what, let's double the number of our awards. So we went from six to 12, which we did for a couple of years. We added dance. Then we added teaching arts. And that's maybe something all of you will feel some affinity for as well. But these are artists who aren't in the mix on their own artwork, but rather on the projects that they create in the world at prisons or hospitals or schools, after-school programs and so on. Did I do it? Yeah. That's great. And I'm going to ask a question that I haven't asked already because I'm interested because I met Esther about three years ago when I came out and was a judge for these awards, which was a fascinating experience for me. I'm wondering where that funding comes from because to me as an artist, when I heard $25,000 of unrestricted cash grant to be used however you want, that was shocking to me. So I'm merely interested in the funding piece of it. Yeah, that's a good question. It all goes back to the building. So in the old days, we paid for everything three arts did using our own money, the net proceeds that we had invested. And we had maybe seven... Where's Gina? I think it was like $17,000 of contributed income. It all came from our board that year. And again, it was the rubbing the two pennies together and hoping the next year we had raised, I think, $54,000 of contributed income. The next year, $100,000. But we were still making up all the difference by using our own coffers, essentially. So when the investments have gone well, the dividends and interest spin off and we're paying for our two-person staff in those days. And we were making a draw from the corpus and we were trying to increase our fundraising efforts without a fundraiser on staff. So it was kind of hard. We were working with a seven-member board at the time. Let's see, in the end of 2014, there was a big change at our organization. I lobbied as hard as I think any executive director could and we hired a director of programs and I spent the last year training her. I had been running all the programs too and so she's now running them except for the one we're going to talk about today. And that left me in the woeful position or I guess it depends on how you look at these things to be the fundraiser that we were missing before, to be a full-time fundraiser. So last year we raised $360,000 of contributed income that's coming to answer more directly from foundations. Some corporations who are basically sponsoring our annual awards presentation, we have naming opportunities for our awards. So, you know, the Gardner family gives us $25,000 to name an award. That means it's therefore called the Three Arts Gardner Family Award, right? We have a growing but still small kind of individual giving program. That's something I have to work on more. It's an interesting moment for me just to be really forthright because I'm not a trained fundraiser. I have no problem speaking passionately about what we do and that's pretty much all I have to go on and I still am the only staff working on fundraising. This year we're projecting about knock on wood. Everybody knock on wood. $410,000 of contributed income. And I think the sweet spot will be when we can raise at least $500,000, our budget is $970,000. That's all the grants, all the staff, the rent, everything. If we can raise maybe $500,000 in contributed income and the rest can come from our portfolios, I think we have a chance to stay around for a while. Our goal is to be here in perpetuity. So, this fundraising business as terrible as it is to bring up is really important. That makes sense? Yes. Excellent. So, now we're going to get into the meat of why these two wonderful people are sandwiched between them. So, is it three years or two years? So, two years ago, you developed a new program and, of course, I wrote it down exactly what it was called. The Three Arts Disability Culture Fellowship. It's just Three Arts Fellowships. Three Arts Fellowships and Disability. No? Just Three Arts Fellowships. But you know what, it was that in the beginning. Ah, gotcha. Three Arts Fellowships at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ah, gotcha. So, can you tell us what that is and how it came about? And then we'll talk about the other parties involved in the development of that. Good, because the other party is far more interesting than I am. So, I'm going to talk about the American Bulls part of the team. So, I alluded to the fact that we have an awards presentation every year. And it's at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. And when we came out of the starting gate supporting artists with disabilities, we sort of, we have a backwards approach, I think, from the rest of the world. It seems like a lot of organizations are thinking about audiences when they think about accessibility. And we were always thinking about the artist. standing at the podium at our awards presentation, I looked out into the 300-person audience and realized we had made a mistake. We weren't doing everything we could do because I could see no one with at least visible disabilities in the audience, whereas we had artists on the stage representing disability culture. This was an eye-opening, I'm mentioning it for a reason, an eye-opening experience from which I've never returned, so to speak. It almost made me stumble in my speech as I saw that and I contacted someone, some of you might know, Dr. Carrie Sandahl. She's a theater artist and a national force in the disability culture activist community. I had met her before and I called her and I said, Carrie, what are we doing wrong? She said come to my office and pretty soon we had ironed out how we were going to have personal assistance and ASL signing and what else do we have, Gina? Captioning. We captioned all of our award videos. We hard captioned them, I don't even know if that's a term, but we didn't rely on screen readers because we were getting gobbledygook when we did, so we've gone back in through seven years of our award videos and now four years of our project videos, to do that by hand. I did all of that and in the next couple of years I, standing at the podium, realized we had maxed out on wheelchair seating. There were seeing eye dogs in the audience. We had another bit of oversight though, which is that I didn't know about audio description and I was giving a talk at the Society of Disability Studies conference and somebody said, what about audio description? I said, well, everything, you can hear everything, you know, whatever, and they said, yeah, but you have dance on stage. And I went, oh, I'm sharing this with you because really our story is a natural story of that which we didn't know and having to keep our ears open. So I went back to Cary with one problem that we had observed. In this international network of residency fellowships that we have, I realized that the artists with disabilities who we support were not applying. And I talked to a couple of them and I said, why don't you want to go to France, why don't you want to go to the Rauschenberg residency on Captiva Island, blah, blah, blah. And I was told, you know, to be in a relatively remote setting 45 minutes away from the nearest medical facility is not something I can do. And I thought, uh-huh, I'm going to call Cary. And I called Cary and I said, Cary, I have an idea. I'd like to have three arts create customized residency fellowships locally that don't require travel, but still have some prestige brought to them. Who's a good partner? Where do I go? And in under a minute, the program was basically begun because Cary said, UIC, we will do it. Did I go off on a tangent? No, not at all. That's why I'm letting you go. She's letting me go. I'm sorry. It's a long story. I'm really trying my best to fast forward. We sat down over many months and talked about what we wanted to do with this program. All of our other residencies, almost all of them, are kind of retreat style residencies. And we thought this one might be something a little bit different. It might be really focused on an issue we both, Cary, had really taught me to understand of a woeful dearth of professional development for artists with disabilities. So there's a circular problem here. Three arts supports artists with disabilities and the UIC fellowships support artists with disabilities. But if artists with disabilities aren't finding a way into the arts and onto stages and onto gallery walls and all of that, then how do we find those artists to bring into these residencies and into our awards? It's a very confusing kind of dilemma. And we decided a solution might be to build into this professional development fellowship a series of public events, a chance to perform publicly, a chance to be placed under the spotlight on stages around Chicago, a chance to speak on panels, and Barack will talk more about all of this, to raise awareness. It's a half, I guess, supporting artist, but it's also about increasing the dialogue in our city around disability culture and trying to make change. Artists receive a $1,500 stipend. It can be within a two, three month period. It's flexible. Artists don't have to be there at set times. We pay for all the accommodations. UIC offers paid teaching opportunities, paid visiting artist gigs. And again, we have public panels, public presentations woven in. We've had, in our first year, it was such a pilot year, it's a customized residency that Kerry and I are the people who work on with the artists. And there were lots of missteps and lots of learning curves. But two artists made exceptional work, including Robert Schlafer, a theater artist and a teaching artist who is deaf. And he had a life or a long desire to translate Yasmina Reza's play art into ASL. And that's what we helped him do. And I'm very pleased to tell you that Steppenwolf Theater Company, some of you might know, is going to be showing that. Not on main stage yet, but in their, what is it, Barack? Their black box or studio program? Yeah, that's it. Politely I declined to talk about that. Yeah, exactly. Oh, okay. So we started to see some momentum here, you know, where our three arts UIC fellows were actually getting on to stages. Arlene Malinowski, our last fellow, worked on a piece, a solo show called A Little Bit Not Normal. She's an artist who, for the first time in this solo performance, is talking about her mental illness, and also growing up the daughter of deaf parents and all of that's woven in this autobiographical piece. Just got word that Victory Gardens Theater is picking that one up in its rep in the fall. So this little program for artists so far, in its second year, I must give kudos to an organization that really deserves them. We were funding this alone. We were doing this alone. And then the NEA came through in our second year and matched our $10,000. And it's because of the NEA that the public aspects of this program have happened. So thank you. So I have a quick question before we we get to the recipient of this fellowship. We talked on the phone about the fact that you sort of went back and forth and trying to decide what, if you wanted to make these fellowships, disability-specific residencies, and sort of what was the discussion around that in terms of how to identify the artist, the community that you were trying to target without sort of singling the community out and how you came to? Yeah, I alluded to this and so have some of you already the difficulties of language and also of identity politics, I guess you would say, you know, where we worked, we knew we were going to have a program that was, again, half part supporting individual artists, creating the work that they want to create in the world, and half parts raising a dialogue around disability culture. And so we wrote a, to give an example of what Christine is getting at, we wrote our first press release and the banner said, you know, first ever university-based fellowship supports artists with disabilities. And because we really care what artists think, you know, that got run past a couple of artists with disabilities who gave us the input that, gee, I thought you picked me for this because I'm making great work, not because I'm an artist with a disability. And we kind of thought about that and thought how do we, it really is for artists with disabilities, so we kind of have to say that, but we understand what the artists were saying, so how do you handle that? We went back to the drawing board and weighed more heavily on kind of the public programming side of the program, and the banner changed to unprecedented new university based fellowship supporting disability culture. And we thought we've done it, this is great, it's the perfect way to say this. And the press release went out to everybody. And a couple of days later, our PR team called me and they said, we want you to see an email we just got from a journalist. And it was a very terse one line that said, great program, but there's no such thing as disability culture. And I sat on that for 24 hours and I thought, you know, the entirety of three arts is built on this idea of listening and responding, even if we're imperfect. And I thought, okay, let me get this lady's number. And I called her and we had a long talk and it turned out that she is a journalist with a disability. She said all artists should be considered just artists and should not be identified as, you know, women, people of color, people with disabilities. And I explained to her we were trying to change the world, so to speak, and we wanted to, as part of our advocacy, make a statement. And we had a very, we never came to a full agreement, but it didn't matter. It was a very good, very helpful talk and it set the tone for these fellowships all the way through. Which is great, which is the perfect segue into talking about Barak. So you received the fellowship in the 2014-15 season, is that right? Or is it this, would it be considered this 2015-16 season? So first of all, congratulations. And I guess I'm going to just ask you something provocative based on what Esther just said. Is there such a thing as disability culture? Well, first, thank you. I want to introduce myself. I'm Barak Adesule. I self-identify as queer, black, cisgendered and disabled, among other identities I respect. I choose to share that because I think politically that conversation asks about the kind of ways we think about identity and how we self-identify. So it's one thing to be a person who self-identifies and to reclaim and own that. And it's another thing to be projected on, to be categorized and to be tokenized and to use terminology to project onto another. So the notion and the politics and the precariousness supposedly around this notion of what disability culture is, is not to ask the non-disabled community, those who do not know what it is, but rather ask those who are in it what it is. And like culture, it is ever evolving. It is rigorous. It is precarious. It is about the essence of biodiversity, which means that these things all come and they all bump up against each other and we strive and we search for the common language. And so it is through the first voice perspective and I think it is ultimately through those who identify and choose to identify as disabled or having a disability, is to ask them. And to ask them is to ask the question of what is culture. And whether it is about disability culture or queer culture, or we can keep on going, it is culture. It impacts us and moves us and without it, we wouldn't be here today. So I have to recognize that disability culture exists and it exists because we are doing it right now, even when we don't think we are. And so I want to talk about that. I have been making work and interpreting performance work for 25 years professionally. And I currently focus my work on the intersection of race and disability. And so I brought up those other identifiers to say not to say that one is more important than the other, but rather this intersection currently is important to me to speak to and it speaks to nuances, it speaks to gender for me and it speaks to maybe the privileges that exist within my own gender, but it begins to allow for analysis and possibility of analysis through a creative lens. And that creative lens for me is working through the intersection of race and disability. What does it mean when these two aspects and their intertwining legacies are brought together in the world? How do they inform each other and what nuances? What more contouring? What more dimensions come up? What more nuanced conversations occur because of that intersection? And for me, throughout my work currently, which has really begun to speak to this as within the last two years, honestly, I've been primarily focusing on race and the racialized body through my own lens and through blackness and what blackness was. And so when I began to engage the culture of disability, the identity of disability, the aesthetics of disability, I began to go into a place of research, which is what I think we as artists do across the board. And so the way in which this fellowship in three yards thoughtfully thought about this fellowship in the way that Carrie Sandell at the University of Illinois, Chicago thought about this fellowship was to begin to say, well, first, I'll be honest, I thought first you must identify as disabled. And I think that reclaiming space is to say that it is a political space. It is a space of calling it out. It is a space of consciousness. And then from there, are you making good work? So yes, you're making good work and you identify as disabled and you recognize that this is a gap. This is a chasm that needs to be filled. Well, then what what do you invest it in? And I was invested through linking at the intersection of race and disability, how to transmit information and communicate that information to multiple communities, centralizing the disabled and racialized community, which for me was also about not creating any kind of binary, not creating any kind of relationship to the other or the supremacist or the hierarchal, rather than centralizing those two communities. And so one of the things that became important to me is that I'm currently making dance work. Dance work as a visual medium in many ways. I was very fascinated with how I could communicate dance to those who do not necessarily privilege or think about sight or sighted, non sighted folk, those who are blind, those who are living with visual impairments. How can I transmit the information to them? And I recognize that at the time I didn't know anything about that. I then began through the network, began to identify someone who was interested in having a conversation around what does audience kitchen look like for dance. And it is through three arts and through the UIC fellowship. I began to go deeper into that conversation. I mean, I think as a choreographer and why I chose to use a choreographer and not necessarily dancer is not that I just interpret work but I also make choices and compose work. As I know, in my heart, when audio describers are describing work, they are choreographers. They are actually giving information and they are articulating the way in which the world will move and dance. They are my collaborator and they are the ultimate choreographer for those who use and want and desire to use that support. So it became, you know, into a conversation around what does that mean and what does it look like? Can that inform my choreographic lens? And so that became a point of research. And that was one. The other one actually became sign language, particularly American sign language, because there are other depending on where you go in the world. Because I was so, I've been so drawn to my life of making work and interpreting work to gesture and gestural language and I find that there is such a depth of beauty to sign and I didn't want to co-opt it at the same time and appropriate it because it is also specific language that also communicates and helps to communicate what I'm doing. So I began to engage with someone who, you know, comes from a family in which she's had to utilize sign language and began to draw relationships between the choreographic notion of gesture and gestural language and what it means for sign. And I know they do things like sign stretching and become supportive license. And so I wanted to begin to recognize the possibility, particularly of how that can inform my work. So those were kind of two particular assistive devices, technology, what we want to call accommodations that I wanted to begin to draw into my aesthetic and recognize those as part of disability culture, disability aesthetic and ways to continue to have, find relationships between my own thoughts around what disability was and my own kind of body and what's happening in the disability community. And so I was like, well, like anything, like everyone, it's quite diverse. So I just find ways to let this information and let the ways in which I'm sharing modesty become, I feel more expansive and it has through this, through this work. And it's in a direct relation to this fellowship sort of allowed, supported you to be able to sort of go down those avenues, yes? Exactly. Because they set the groundwork for you. They made all these things available to you. Well, I think, and I would say this is important. They were closer to the mic. Thank you. Closer to the mic. Between Carrie Sandal and Esther, I say particularly, they know a network of folks. So it's a network. So it's not so much about what they did for me because they never would approach it from the kind of missionary model or what they lay ground. Like I said, it's customized. I began to ask questions of what it is I'm interested in. They began to say, well, this is a possibility. This is a part of a network. And through that network, deep in or I've provided an opportunity for relationships, which I think is the other key thing. It is through the cultivated relationships. I got to know Esther before I even received a fellowship. I knew of Carrie Sandal before I received a fellowship. It is through the articulation of those relationships, the nuance of the relationships that this felt good to me. It wasn't someone not knowing my work. It was actually someone knowing my work and saying, well, I would love to find how we can support you and your continued discovery and evolution of your work. And you mentioned the other night when you were at the talk back that you also worked with. On a, I guess, does she refer to herself as a designer? I'm talking about Sandy. Just if you want to talk for a second about your collaboration with your costume design with Sandy Yee. Yes. I mean, because part of that was I wanted to acknowledge that the work I was making time and the work I desire to make is highly collaborative. And it always is, but I want to really make that pronounced and to really think for myself, I've been thinking about this particularly and begin to produce this work. How do I engage the aesthetic of disability and the culture of disability in every aspect of the work and production and process and administration? So for me, that began to identify and connect with those who I also identify disabled and who are also making work. And so Sandy Yee, a shout out for Sandy Yee, approached me and said, well, I make work and she identifies disabled and particularly she talks about the way in which her hands, which is related to her disability, gives information. So she hand stitched the work. She hand stitched the piece turtle that I showed an excerpt from on Thursday. She hand stitched the shell. She informed, you know, she reconstructed and re-dismantled some of the gene material and she did all that work. And so I felt like when I was in turtle, I was carrying, I say ashay in certain tradition, I was carrying her energy and her essence and the beauty of thinking about when hand work is done, what that means and what does it mean for someone to put that energy into the work. And I felt like she was a very much a part of the world and helping me in terms of carrying the work. So that's one of the beauties I began to recognize and I began to continue to think how can I allow that essence, that energy to permeate and to interact with folks who want to bring themselves. I'm, you know, I'm talking with a lying designer who revealed, you know, about their disability and they revealed it after I had begun the conversations and it all became, all of a sudden, oh, how do you bring yourself? Do you want to bring that aspect and what does that mean? You know, and I have to say it's not that we all make work from our lived experiences. It's not all of a sudden that, oh disabled, now they're talking about, we may pronounce it, we may make it overt, we may make it literal, but we all create from our lived experiences. So it's like whether or not we, we begin to appreciate and affirm how certain contributions have not been acknowledged, have been invisibleized, have been erased, and this is the effort to affirm, to reshape, and to recontextualize the ways in which work is shown, presented, and supported now through this lens. And this is another lens that we're offering and we were looking to be validated and affirmed and to have held as in any art form. I love that word invisibleized. Yeah, it's great. I had so many questions, but you've kind of answered most of them so eloquently. So I think, where's Tiffany? How are we on time, Tiffany? Good shape. But I also know Barack was interested in the room. Yes, that's why I'm asking. I just want to ask you, Barack, one more question before we open it up to the audience for questions. What advice would you give to other companies based on the experience that you had working with Three Arts? Other companies or other companies or institutions who may want to sort of follow the Three Arts model in terms of supporting artists making work. Okay. From your own personal experience, navigating through that. All right. So first I came up with this notion of this formula because there tend to been this formula on this model. And I was like, well, you know, I had a lot of challenges with math. So I was like, I'm going to create a mathematical equation actually to challenge myself. And so then I came up with one formula which was like one by one, like one times one times one times one times one infinity. Every individual time, every one individual, you choose a one individual exponentially, it will grow collectively. But every individual, each time that you interact. And I know this is a challenge, but this is the idea. What I believe with Esther and with Kerry is that they chose every individual every time and it grows collectively. So it's each time each artist you come in and I say it's for anyone each time each artist is one. And so you choose and you engage with that one individual you cultivate a relationship and you go to next artists and you have built energy, but that individual artist may have something that is distinct. So choose one by one by one and continue until infinity and continue until well, you need to recognize that it can actually grow. And while we think of it always as individualized things, collectively it becomes exponentially this amazing network, this amazing opportunity and it just it will grow from there. So I think that that's that's my easy answer. That's a fantastic answer and you guys are making my job so easy because it's a perfect segue into what I wanted to finish up with you is saying one of the things that Esther and I talked about was I asked her why she thinks three artists have been successful so far in their efforts and she said that Carrie said to her the reason that three artists have been successful is because Esther listened to her and then she took action. And so it does follow Barack's principle of the one to want you and Carrie found each other and then together you created this thing and then. Yeah, I I don't think I can add to the one by one by one because I really love that. But yeah, I mean, it's. I wish it were something more complex. You know, I wish I had a more complicated answer and kind of jazzy answer for you. But really in our experience, so we have a philosophy of three arts that, you know, everything we build is based on listening to artists and what they need and weighing that in the balance with our resources and capacity. And we try and stretch ourselves really as far as we can. To support individual artists individually, you know, so our office is always open. For example, we give feedback sessions to any artists who is nominated for our award but did not get it. Those are one on one one on one sessions. We have one on one financial workshops. We have, you know, mentorship, coaching, etc. And so that's I don't know it may be a chicken and egg thing, you know, was that Barak your style was that my style was that Carrie style or is it an organizational style or are the two things just conjoined? But I can tell you if it's the way I think it the way I think everything is built well, not from the top down, not from the numbers down, but you build it learning each step of the way and then going a little bit further down the road. I just want to I do want to add something that actually Esther shared with me that I thought was really important in between this notion of listening to action is, you know, we is responsiveness. You mentioned that you mentioned that I've listened to about two years ago, responsiveness. How do you respond to what has been communicated to you? How do you how do you how do you let know the artists that you've responded? So in that interim time of not being able to act, we can't act all the time. Like all of a sudden we can't just build a ramp, right? We can't we can try to make those things happen and manifest. But in the time between the listening is responding to let me let them know that we've listened and then moving us to towards the act of the action and to not to not leave any opportunity for gaps that that that do not carry that. And I think that that is very important and that it is we have to begin to look at the rigor of communication in this regard and we have to think that it simple is actually so important into the moving it forward because we all can we all may be able to draw into that to not take for granted to not make some some process something that we thought is so small to like leave it out that may become the very important linchpin to moving forward. And so I think when Esther brought responsiveness it is being in tune with that and understanding that that has to move in its own time and its own way. And so if we continue to do that and I think that that will lead to the action which will actually feel sustainable. I was just thinking that to add to that I think is vulnerability you know it's a willingness to be vulnerable and say gee I don't know what do you think or I have never been here before or you know how should we get this done and to just be in it it's not always easy I mean we all especially in the non-profit world have a ton of other things we have to pay attention to but it is the single most rewarding path and I would argue the path that gets you where gets us where we want to go. It's great so with that I think we'll open it up if anybody has any questions. So I'm really when you were mentioning the process of feedback and one on one feedback that is so extraordinary to me particularly when it comes to artists with disabilities because I think sometimes my experience is that people don't want to give feedback because they're afraid of hurting feelings or you know and or they don't know how so I'm just curious either from the perspective of giving feedback or Barak your experience of who you trust to give you feedback how you seek your feedback on your work just wondering if you could speak a little bit about feedback. I'll go quickly I think yours will be more interesting than mine. It is unusual and it's unusual in the world of awards programs and significant grants for individual artists more often than not you get a letter in the mail and it says sorry Charlie or congratulations Charlie and and we added this line of I don't remember anymore maybe five years ago at the bottom that just said you know if you want to meet with us call. They have to meet before so our awards program we've just picked our newest awardees will announce them in early October by the end of this year you can no longer make a feedback session because the new cycle starts up again and we don't want there to be any conflict for people who are reapplying right. So we have these one on one sessions and we're up to about 30 a year now so I think that's a third of all the applicants are actually seeking feedback and they begin kind of the same way we're going to share with you anything that the judges and you remember this asked us to share with you particular observations that they had about your application. But we're also going to share with you our opinion as the facilitator of this program what might have strengthened this application. And this is where Barack comes in because we rarely we don't talk about and this might disappoint you the so-called quality of the work so we have a very firm policy that we don't tell our jury panels you know quality is based on this these seven things quality in our mind is and in reality I think completely subjective and to try and rank it brings to bear who's quality right who's being the judge here we don't do that what we do do is we talk about gee you explain kind of how you make your art but you never said why that's a very common error you we asked you to tell us about we only have three questions in the application by the way asked you to tell us about your full self you know and you only said that you're a visual artist with X gallery and so we don't have a good sense of you when we asked you to talk about what you dream about doing in the future you didn't take us all the way home on our application we designed it ourselves it's an online portal we have notes for artists and the first note says pretend you are in the room with the judges right now and you've just been given five minutes what do they need to know so we we talk those things through each feedback session takes about an hour and a half it's one on one it's closed door there have been artists in our offices who have been nominated you know five times in a row who are very frustrated we explain to them we don't pick the artists the jury panels change every year therefore never pass up an opportunity to apply sometimes we sit in the room and we show them other grant programs and try and you know help them find a way to support their work until they can get a three arts award those are just it's a very cursory view of what it is we do but it's a real one on one when you wrote this sentence I'm trying to understand what you mean and if I have if you're leaving questions on the table with me I imagine you're leaving questions on the table with the jury panel so remember when you write something to ask yourself would anybody understand it right we don't care about grammar we don't care about misspellings we don't care about the formatting that is not an issue we take that off the table at our jury panel so we don't talk about that stuff does that help okay and thank you for not worrying about grammar about not worrying about that because those become barriers all the time and sometimes get in the way of the artist trying to relay and share the essence that they can't fit the format it's another box it's another box it's another box within a box so I appreciate this I didn't know that wow I could have made multiple I didn't know that I do you understand though I actually spend time and sometimes hours making sure that it is properly articulated and that wow thank you doesn't hurt Barak that doesn't hurt well I mean I just want to say thank you but I also want to acknowledge that I think I just want to acknowledge that it feels like in my experience of making and performing arts and grants making grants how rare it is to have an organization give that kind of feedback it's been an hour and a half with anyone who wants to so I affirm any opportunity for that because it gives the artist the opportunity to understand the context by which you're making work and making art and articulating that to a grant that maybe something I'm not familiar with that that is a bridge to possibly align with continue to think and progress their honing of their understanding their understanding their own work and form and how they communicate it so I want to I thank you for that there was another talk about the internal was there talk about the internal process maybe of artist feedback and actually I began a process and I need to acknowledge Liz Lairman for the critical response because the dance artists around the late 90s I began to utilize the critical response and so I have been an ongoing conversation since 1996 about using that and I use it all the time and have curated dialogues where I facilitate using the critical response and are you all familiar with critical response and if you're not please look it up online through Liz Lairman because I don't know if I can articulate to you all of the nuances but is for me a leading for me a leading practice and being able to speak to work that is artist centered not audience center and that's the challenge um and so so I've been doing this in 1996 and I also engage open space technology which is another format to which to open and to address and if you're not familiar with that please look up open space technology I utilize both those methodologies my practice to both gain information when I am drawing from audience and to also help others facilitate their own interests and investment and getting feedback and this for me was the first the first opportunity for me to engage very clearly with three artists is that I was asked to facilitate a critical critical response my own methodology approach to that with a group of artists who had received support through three arts and so that was an opportunity within the interior of the professional development is for them to do peer to peer just to be able to articulate that and it was and you know it was really interesting and I'm interested in the ongoing notion of the kind of critical discourse which is so essential and you brought up the notion of what happens when you add an identifier and people do not want to approach that they go oh I can't talk about it because this person is disabled this person is queer this person really honestly if you cannot do that then it's okay don't you don't have to but if you are interested I have used critical response help support the artist in that in that moment and the artist gets the opportunity within the critical response to ask questions of the audience that they want feedback for they get to often times not oftentimes the audience has to ask if they want an opinion and the artist says I don't want your opinion I mean things like that that give autonomy ultimately to the artist so I think those are ways I began to approach that and so I'm interested I don't know and continue with three arts particularly how to utilize that as an opportunity for artists to give feedback and to begin to deal with that bridge because that that can also become a barrier to them if you continue to feel like you are in your own bubble and no one wants to no one that you trust is actually able to give you the feedback and then how do you how do you grow critical analysis is and the discourse and that is helping that shapes our world so how can we how can we really support artists who live within these identities and want to speak deeply to identities how can we support them and continue to have conversation that supports their artistry through this critical lens yeah I had a question so you had mentioned earlier about politely declining using Steppenwolf's second sort of studio theater and I just wanted to ask more generally along those lines how both as facilitators for institutions administrators for institutions but also for artists how to strategically navigate the divide between disability sort of community disability culture disability arts and all the funding and all the community all the networking that goes around that to support artists and to project them out into the world and to share their vision and their work with with you know a diverse audience as possible and how to as an artist to then parlay some of that momentum into a sort of parallel world of institutions that support artists that try to expose them to audiences but they are doing it on the sort of mainstream without a sort of demarcation of this type of artist that we're only funding so I think a really good very overt example of that is to you know participate in a festival that's like a main festival like where you have like Florida State you know and they have this big dance festival with major names you know Barista Cops Company or you know all the big names do that and then there's a secondary sort of oh and we're going to do a disabled festival as a part of it and I just wonder like you know what is the what's the strategy and how do you handle making a living as an artist and deciding no I'm not doing the secondary theater versus I need the income and so I am going to do it even though I don't feel like maybe it's appropriate you know what I'm saying so I just curious what your thoughts are on that sort of divide and you know having your foot in two places and how to sort of navigate that yeah so now you're wanting me to speak politically which is not for me integrated into my my whole being and so I want to first recognize that that I and even within the context of this conversation I'm opening myself up to that conversation and that now every artist should nor be mandated to have to speak about things politically otherwise unless they want to speak about it and I think I say this just because I think oftentimes that I am I may be the first or maybe one of the first few to be the entryway the bridge the gatekeeper to the influx and the flow of artists and any identifiers what you know disability black we can keep going and oftentimes I'm the test I'm the experiment I'm the what happens if we fail what happens if we get it right and I recognize that if you continue to put artists through that I hope you acknowledge that fact that you are putting them through that and if you are not that you are helping to erase you're helping to not allow them to sustain their practice you're not allowing them to be the artists that they are designed to be and so I recognize in this moment that I am making myself vulnerable to that because I choose to not because I'm mandated to and that we should not we should not we should not we should continue to allow for an artist to be first and foremost and end the conversation and ask them the question and so I have to say that I say this also to recognize that with the artists that that was a great opportunity for them to be on a stepping wolf stage of any kind is great so I do not want to belittle that but I want to recognize the fact that there are demarcations all the time constantly it is placed in a different box and when I say again back to the box not a box that I chose an essay being but a box that's placed in order to support a funding situation in order to create a further marginalization for me of that moment I don't need to be further marginalized I don't need to be further in a box I don't need to be further categorized beyond my own self identification so I think that one of the things that happens is is when we put those marginalized we marginalize them we place them in a separate category have we asked them if they want to be there and that asking is very challenging and precarious as you talked about because what artist doesn't want to get that support what artist doesn't want to have that platform and so it's quite precarious so it's up to those who are making decisions because it is oftentimes not the artist present or that person present making decisions to begin to ask yourself and to begin to rigorously address are you further marginalizing them in the act of supporting them and if you are being if you can begin to ask that question then I think that you begin to wait to a consciousness that allows us to begin to look at and possibly dismantle that very model that is marginalizing them so that's why I was political about Stepan because I think it's a great opportunity but I don't want to be a further demarcation it's the same for other theaters and entities when they do these specialized things that that is clear for me that if are they asking the artist is the first voice perspective present not just at the table then to be reinterpreted and to not make a decision but are they all the way through a part of the experience are they helping to facilitate the manifestation the implementation the administration and the actualization of that program Hello, Porick Nocton Arts and Disability Ireland I'm I was intrigued as I was listening to the three arts description of your residencies and what really struck me was the parallels between your residencies and our own and I think that the one thing that that struck me was the issues that you had around isolation and the and around actual access to the international residencies you had for other artists and our issues that in Ireland we have faced when we have set up residencies and as have a lot of and other international colleagues I would know who work with artists with disabilities and I suppose all I would say is there are people like us out there who have had the same issues in other words what I'm saying is that I think it is possible to have international residencies and maybe link in with people like ourselves and others because actually the issues you had around access and you have created a very successful program in Chicago we have had to deal with those issues in let's say in our visual arts studio with the fire station artist studios in Dublin and that would be only one example and I'd encourage you at some point to relook at the international but using what you've learned from having to refocus on Chicago for those residencies to make them accessible thank you I will be looking at Dublin I want to say that we kept all of our other residency programs they are open to all of our artists Camargo some of you might know the Jerome Foundation in Minnesota they have Camargo Foundation on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea that's their residency program it's an estate from Jerome Hill I think his name is that they are you know aiming to make very accessible and in truth the interior is but if you want to go to the beach you're dealing with seriously rocky terrain to give an example we decided to so a mandate for three arts is that we want to pick our residencies based on the most accessible ones we can find and that welcome artists of all the disciplines we support so it's hard to find residencies that match both of those criteria we stayed at Camargo because they are undergoing a plan right now to renovate that property and make it fully accessible and we're watching it and we all hope to have a site visit there right Gina if they've done it but I thank you for that this the residency fellowship program is one that we are always eager to expand upon this this has been a fantastic conversation and I want to just take a moment to acknowledge Barak especially that your choice to open up in the way that you have here is a real gift so thank you and if there's anything else you want to share please take a moment is there anything else I want to share I mean I I want to acknowledge the fact that I appreciate the lead made a choice to integrate performance into the work that for me was very satisfying opportunity and I'm really I'm glad that it does because we place that body present we place our present things shift the conversation shifts and there's other opportunities so I want to acknowledge that I also want to acknowledge within my own speaking about disability to recognize that disability is both what is read as disabled and what is also invisible and the recognize within my own that we make no assumptions when the artist says they have a disability what that is and that it is it becomes a little bit of a guessing game for folk I know sometimes people have I'll say honest the most brilliant folk I know deeply engaged in the art form and supporting arts have asked me questions that they would not ask of me if I was talking if I removed disability and put blackness you know like well what did like how long have you been black you know can you talk a little bit about your blackness you know or gender you know so I I say that to say not to say that we can't be vulnerable in our experiences and transparent but the notion of what a notion of no assumptions the notion of asking the questions I think and supporting an environment that allows for that to happen is what I'm looking for so I there are multiple people who have this will and then who have invisible disabilities that I want to also support and affirm them and I have to say the last thing is that there has been a challenge and one of things happened the challenge is that it can take so much effort and I'll say this much sometimes more effort to get work on the stage than to actually do the work and that means for me the rigor of the production process the you know that happens sometimes as an artist who does not necessarily just have a physical disability but a mental one the mental dexterity has asked the rigor of trying to make sure even a tech that's a very good point we should never take for granted or assume the notion that what it takes to get the 59 emails to try and get to the tech that all those things if they begin to become through the lens if everything becomes a lens of disability or lens of the opportunity for that shifts and so I understand the physical costs of my body every time I have to enter into that place and into that moment and if we begin to begin and this is where I ask for the nuance and working towards the nuance we begin to think every step of the way how can we plan how can we support what questions we do ask what ways can we map the space do I know what the bathroom is how many feet is the bathroom from me do I know what level is on so because that's exactly what I do every time I walk into a space not just the choreographer who is fascinated with it I'm constantly okay it's going to take me it's going to take me how many spoons I got left today y'all know the spoon theory look it up so you begin to look at that understand that don't take any for granted make all those things visible how transparent can you be how vulnerable can we both be and how can we deepen and cultivate our relationship and that's what I'm in support of the intimacy and the beauty of cultivating deeper relationships I would also just add to that and say understand that for a lot of people with disabilities that process begins the moment we wake up in the morning so it just doesn't happen when we are entering your spaces it happens when we how we're navigating through our living spaces it happens when we're on our way to your spaces and often by the time we get to the rehearsal space there's been 15 things that have happened that have been in danger of us preventing from getting to the rehearsal space so just be mindful of the fact that all of those things contribute to how many spoons we have left during the day and I just thanks thank you thank you guys so much thank you 15 minutes and I'd love to pick up some post-it notes